Feel and feeling: like verb, like nouns?

This paper deals with the substantives feel and feeling in contemporary English. Feel refers to the properties of the objects of perception, it is therefore connected with sensory perceptions ("I like the feel of old leather") and with the perception of an atmosphere ("Although the table is brand-new, it has the look and feel of an antique", "It's a big city but it has the feel of a small town"). Feeling, on the other hand, denotes sensations and emotions ("a feeling of hunger/excitement/sadness"; "guilty feelings") or the ability to have physical sensations ("He had no feeling in his right leg"). It can also be synonymous with "idea" or "belief" ("He suddenly had the feeling of being followed"). Finally, like the substantive feel, it can refer to the atmosphere given off by a place, a situation, etc. ("They have managed to recreate the feeling of the original theatre"). Most of the meanings of feeling focus on the experiencer, his or her perceptions, affects and opinions. Consequently, feel and feeling differ in that the latter refers essentially to the experiencer and the former to the object of perception and its properties. However, it is noteworthy that one of the meanings of feeling also refers to what is perceived, so that the two substantives coincide semantically, and it is this semantic coincidence that is under scrutiny in this paper. This contribution is based on the study of occurrences drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English, so as to analyze the context and the parameters of enunciation at play in the use of one lexeme rather than the other.

Keywords: feel; feeling; perception; sensations; semantics; collocations